Posted
by
kdawsonon Sunday March 07, 2010 @12:26AM
from the you-had-zeros? dept.

Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.

Brady Forrest writes: "Next week from March 1-5 there will be ~65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. Most of the Ignites will be streamed from Ignite video site."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: Lawmakers are considering a bill that would prohibit peer-to-peer file sharing programs from being installed onto computers without consent. The P2P Cyber Protection and Information User Act will also require software developers to inform people when their files are made available to others via peer-to-peer networks.Authority would be given to the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the act.

NEOGEOman writes: I work for a small company in Australia that sells a business product developed in Canada. We've come to rely on Google's AdWords system to bring us business — the vast majority of our new customers contact us because we came up near the top of their search for inventory control software. Google just cut us off, with an automated form letter that describes all kinds of offenses that don't apply to us (except perhaps our fairly unattractive landing page) and their stern wording and lack of response seems to indicate that there's no way to appeal or even find out what we did wrong. We've been AdWords users for years, and give Google a comparatively modest $1,000+ every month. Without this source of customers, we're kind of panicking. Our Canadian head office is panicking more, since their account is still active but their business is obviously the same. They have more staff than we do, and a lot more riding on continued AdWords success. We might fail without AdWords, but we WILL fail without our parent company.

My question for Slashdot is: If you're a legitimate small business selling legitimate software and Google cuts you off with the same letter they use to kill malware purveyors (Our software's might not be world-class but malware is a bit of a stretch!) what do you do?

ACKyushu writes: Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters.

The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers.Link to Original Source